Fall 2008
Team-Based Learning (TBL): An Effective Strategy for Increasing Student Engagement and Learning
September 16. Rick Goedde, Economics and Management Studies, St. Olaf College; and Fernan Jaramillo, Biology, Carleton College
Social Entrepreneurship: An Emerging Field in Higher Education
September 19. Greg Dees, Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, Duke University
Academic Journaling: Effective techniques to assess student learning
September 24. Pat Smith, Director, CEL; Sandy Malecha, Associate Director, Internships Program; and faculty participants tba
How Students use Moodle: Here a click, there a click, everywhere a click click…
September 30. Kari Lie, Norwegian
Teaching Creativity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
October 8. Faculty panel tba
Enhancing Student Engagement and Learning Using “Clicker”-based Interactive Classroom Technology
October 21. Gary Muir, 2008-09 CILA Associate, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Series
Provost’s Sabbatical Luncheon
October 28. Mary Griep, Art and Art History; and Steve Reece, Classics
Teaching as Vocation
November 5. Carol Holly, Engish; and Dan Hofrenning, Political Science, 2007-08 Lilly Vocational Scholars
Technology Poster Session
November 11. Faculty practitioners tba
President’s Colloquy
November 19.
Internationalizing the Classroom with Effective Assignments
December 02. Dana Gross, Psychology; Anna Kuxhausen, History/Russian Area Studies; and Tom Williamson, Sociology and Anthropology
Spring 2009
Designing Rubrics for Improved Grading and Powerful Outcomes Assessment
February 11. John Bean, Professor of English and Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment, Seattle University
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series: Performing CPR in a General Education Chemistry Course Improves (_C_)ritical Thinking, (_P_)uzzling and (_R_)easoning Skills
February 18. Greg Muth, Chemistry and 2008-09 CILA Associate
Provosts Sabbatical Luncheon
February 24. Karen Cherewatuk, Professor of English; Paul Zorn, Professor of Mathematics
Capturing Scholarly Inquiry into Learning: Teaching Portfolios
March 03. Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Kansas
Taming Technology: Useful Ideas for Teaching with Film from Boldt Seminarians
March 11. Diana Postlethwaite, English and Boldt Chair in the Humanities; Jim Hanson, Religion; and Judy Kutulas, History, American Studies, Womens Studies
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series: Teaching Creativity and Creative Teaching: Using Creative Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines
March 18. Jenny Dunning, English and 2008-09 CILA Associate; with members of the Learning Community on Creative Writing Across the Curriculum: Karen Achberger; German; Marc Robinson, Russian; Sharon Powell, Family Studies
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series: Teaching Underprepared Students at St. Olaf College
April 08. Diane Angell, Biology, and Heather Campbell, Education, 2008-09 CILA Associates; with members of the Learning Community on The Faculty Role in Successful Outcomes for Under-prepared College Students’
Moving the Classroom into the Community: Four Examples of Academic Civic Engagement
April 14. Dana Gross, Psychology; Eric Fure-Slocum, History, American Conversations; Nate Jacobi, CEL-Civil Engagement Program; Paul Roback, MSCS-Statistics; Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak, Political Science and Asian Studies
President’s Colloquy
April 22. President David Anderson
Assessing Professional Activity for Tenure and Promotion: What we learn from departmental statements for professional activity
April 28. Rick Goedde, Economics, Management Studies, and former chair of the Tenure and Promotion Committee; Mary Walczak, Chemistry, and Director of Evaluation and Assessment in 2008; Tonya Kjerland, Institutional Research and Evaluation
Descriptions
Fall
Team-Based Learning (TBL): An Effective Strategy for Increasing Student Engagement and Learning
Tuesday, September 16
Rick Goedde, Economics and Management Studies, St. Olaf College
Fernan Jaramillo, Biology, Carleton College
Have you found that lecturing may be losing some of its effectiveness in reaching todays students? Are you looking for ways to increase your own enjoyment of teaching? Are you skeptical of the value of group work? TBL, which focuses on students sharing the responsibility for their learning with the instructor and each other, may be the answer. Almost all lecturing is replaced with in-class teamwork and class discussion. TBL addresses problems normally associated with student groups, such as the free-rider problem, fair evaluation procedures, and finding time to meet. Research on TBL shows that well-functioning learning teams can accomplish more than even the best student can accomplish alone. In addition, more and more work in both public and private sectors takes place in teams, and TBL helps students learn these skills. Come prepared to experience some of what a student in a TBL class, such as those taught be Rick and Fernán, would encounter. You will take an iRAT, a gRAT, and participate in a TAE. Dont miss this chance to learn about a dramatically different way to teach and learn!
For additional information about team-based learning, see www.teambasedlearning.org.
Social Entrepreneurship: An Emerging Field in Higher Education
Friday, September 19
Greg Dees, Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, Duke University
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Experiential Learning (CEL) and the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA))
Greg Dees, one of the leading voices in the emerging area of social entrepreneurship, offers this partial definition: “when people with business-like [entrepreneurial] methods come together with innovative solutions to social problems.” Like business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs are able to create new opportunities: an entrepreneur “always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it,” finding inspiration, for example, in “shifting demographics, updated technologies, or new social attitudes.”
Dees will discuss the history of social entrepreneurship on college and university campuses, and its role in preparing students to develop their own innovative solutions to complex social problems. He will also address the growing need for new theoretical frameworks/models to strengthen the practice of social entrepreneurship, and will explore the opportunities and challenges colleges face in building strong interdisciplinary communities of practice and knowledge.
Greg Dees holds a Masters degree in Public and Private Management from Yale, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins. He has taught at the Yale School of Management and at the Harvard Business School. In 1995, Greg received the Harvard Business School’s Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. In 1996, Dees took a two-year leave to work on economic development in central Appalachia at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development in Berea, Kentucky. He was the Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service and co-director of the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University from 1998-2001. He joined the faculty of Duke University in 2001.
Please join us for what promises to be a lively discussion.
For additional information, see “Developing the Field of Social Entrepreneurship,” a report from the Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship,. (Note, in particular, the executive summary, pages v-vi.)
Academic Journaling: Effective techniques to assess student learning
Wednesday, September 24
Pat Smith, Director, CEL
Heather Campbell, Education; Eric Lund, director of International and Off-Campus Studies; Sandy Malecha, associate director, Internships Program; Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb, Sociology and Anthropology; Pat Smith, director of CEL
(co-sponsors: CEL, International and Off-Campus Studies (IOCS), and the St. Olaf Writing Program)
Last June, the Center for Experiential Education surveyed St. Olaf faculty members about their academic uses of journals. Of the approximately 80 responses received, about 60 reported using journals. While most journals are in traditional paper form, there are growing numbers of faculty using electronic journals, including web blogs. Some faculty members noted that journals “brought up excellent questions for class discussion,” and that they “encourage students to relate readings to experiences and observations.” Others, however, cautioned that “it’s an easy assignment to fake,” and that journals are “time consuming to review.”
Sandy Malecha and Pat Smith will provide an overview of what they learned from the survey, summarizing what respondents identified as successes and challenges with using journals. Faculty members Heather Campbell, Eric Lund, and Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb will draw on their own experiences using journals to lead a discussion about best practices.
How Students use Moodle: Here a click, there a click, everywhere a click click…
Tuesday, September 30
Kari Lie, Norwegian
(co-sponsor: Information and Instructional Technologies (IIT))
Moodle, the classroom management system we use at St. Olaf, has been adopted by nearly half of our faculty members, and, of course, most of our students use it in at least some of their classes. While faculty members know a lot about how we use Moodle, we know very little about how our students use it. Kari’s recent dissertation research investigated student use of Moodle by examining what students “click on”. She’ll provide us with an overview of her research, followed by specific examples of how students use Moodle. Each example will provide an opportunity for discussion of what we can learn from these student practices, how that might affect our approach to Moodle, and how we can use this understanding to improve our students’ learning.
Teaching Creativity: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
Wednesday, October 08
Irve Dell, Art and Art History; John Schade, Environmental Studies; Howard Thorsheim, Psychology; and Mary Titus, English and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies (CIS)
(co-sponsor: Academic Year Theme – “Science and the Liberal Arts”)
The scientist, Carl Sagan, is reputed to have said that “it is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.” The writer, Maya Angelou, has commented that, “ creativity is like electricity. We don’t understand how it works we just use it.” Recent research in neuroscience, however, suggests that we may have begun to develop new understandings of creativity.
This session invites a conversation exploring how different disciplines those in the sciences as well as those in the fine arts and humanities conceptualize creativity. Do we mean different things by creativity in an art course as compared with a course in environmental studies? Is important for our students to be creative? Can we teach them creativity? If so, how do we do that?
Resources on this topic:
– Jonah Lehrer, Annals of Science, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2008
See http://www.tedi.uq.edu.au/downloads/biggs_solo.pdf for discussion of the S.O.L.O. (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy (developed by John Biggs), which has been applied to gauging the level of creativity in students’ work.
– Biggs, J. & Tang, C. Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the student does. 3rd ed. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press/Society for Research into Higher Education. (2007)
– Alan Lightman. “A Sense of the Mysterious,” Daedalus (September 22, 2003)
Enhancing Student Engagement and Learning Using “Clicker”-based Interactive Classroom TechnologyTuesday, October 21
Gary Muir, 2008-09 CILA Associate, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Series
(co-sponsor: IIT)
How can we facilitate student engagement and learning in the classroom in a way that builds on students’ increasing uses of interactive technologies in their everyday lives? How can we increase student participation in the classroom? Personal Response Systems (PRS), or “clickers,” are an interactive technology that provides answers to both of these questions. Clickers make learning a more active and interactive process, enabling our students to become more engaged in the classroom. In addition, because student responses can be anonymous, clickers remove the social barriers that may discourage more public responses. In this session we will take part in hands-on demonstrations using clickers, and discuss how clickers can and have been used to enhance both student engagement and learning in the classroom.
Here is a link to a useful overview article regarding clickers: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/publinks/CRLT_no22.pdf.
Teaching as Vocation
Wednesday, November 05
Brian Borovsky, Physics; Dan Hofrenning, Political Science and 2007-08 Lilly Vocational Scholar; Carol Holly, English and 2007-08 Lilly Vocational Scholar; and Donna McMillan, Psychology
(co-sponsor: Lilly Program for Lives of Worth and Service)
In recent years, St. Olaf College has focused attention on the topic of vocation. But very little has been said about the vocation which the faculty of the college practice every day. This session provides an opportunity for faculty to talk about what it means to be “called” to teach. What does it mean to be a teacher? Can we understand this work as a calling or vocation? If we do, what are the implications? These and other questions will be taken up first by a panel of faculty colleagues and then by other participants. We look forward to a lively, engaging discussion.
Left off the original announcement was a list of four books suggested for further reading on teaching and vocation:
– Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard, 2004)
– Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher (Chicago, 1991)
– Mary Rose O’Reilly, The Garden at Night: Burnout and Breakdown in the Teaching Life (Heineman, 2005)
– Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (Jossey-Bass, 1998)
Technology Poster Session
Tuesday, November 11
Faculty practitioners tba
President’s Colloquy
Tuesday, November 19
Current Economic Conditions and Higher Education
The Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) is pleased to announce the first “President’s Colloquy on Higher Education” for the academic year 2008-2009. As President Anderson describes this series, “it is intended to be an occasional series of conversations about issues facing higher education in America and their impact on St. Olaf.” He hosts one faculty lunch conversation each semester, and will also invite occasional speakers to campus to address important issues in higher education.
In this colloquy, David will lead a discussion on actual and potential consequences of the current financial crisis for higher education and St. Olaf College. Background readings for the colloquy are found below. These include copies of statements on the financial crisis by college presidents to their respective communities, a report from Moody’s, the bond rating service, and a reflection on the impact of previous recessions on higher education by David W. Breneman (a former college president, and current professor of the economics of education at the University of Virginia).
Internationalizing the Classroom with Effective Assignments
Tuesday, December 02
Dana Gross, Psychology; Anna Kuxhausen, History/Russian Area Studies; and Tom Williamson, Sociology and Anthropology
The St. Olaf Mission Statement talks about an education “incorporating a global perspective,” and we often point to the wide range of study abroad opportunities and the large numbers of students who take advantage of these programs as evidence of our commitment. But how do we actually incorporate a global perspective into our courses on campus? The presenters for this session will talk about how they have designed effective assignments to incorporate a global perspective in the classes they teach. Dana will provide an overview from the perspective of her discipline of national efforts to internationalize the undergraduate psychology curriculum and promote cultural competence. She’ll provide examples of assignments from her courses, highlighting her on-campus Interim course, “Human Development in East Asia: Perspectives from China and Japan.” Anna will discuss assignments she uses in her European and Russian history courses to encourage students to think about different national and regional perspectives on international issues. Tom will talk about an assignment from his Global Interdependence course that asks students to think about the constraints of a global perspective. He’s interested in having his students consider what we may miss when we imagine experience in global terms.
– Vivien Stewart, “Becoming Citizens of the World,” Educational Leadership, Volume 64, Number 7, Pages 8-14, April 2007
– I. Davies, Evans, M., & Reid, A. Globalizing Citizenship education? A critique of “global education” and “citizenship education”. British Journal of Educational Studies, 53(1), 66-89. (2005).
Spring
Designing Rubrics for Improved Grading and Powerful Outcomes Assessment
Wednesday, February 11
John C. Bean, Professor of English and Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment, Seattle University
(co-sponsor: Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation)
John describes what promises to be a particularly engaging and useful CILA Conversation in the following way:
“The goal of this workshop is to demystify the use of rubrics for grading or assessment. The workshop will offer nuts-and-bolts, time-saving strategies for designing rubrics that can speed up your grading process, increase the consistency of your grading (and your confidence in your grades), and give students meaningful feedback on their work. We’ll also discuss ways that a rubric, when applied to an embedded assignment in a course, can create an effective strategy for departmental or college outcomes assessment.”
Suggested References:
1. Bean, John C., David Carrithers, and Theresa Earenfight. “How University Outcomes Assessment Has Revitalized Writing-Across-the-Curriculum at Seattle University.” WAC Journal, 16 (2005): 5-21
2. Walvoord, B. E., and Anderson, V. J. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998
3. Stevens, Danelle D. and Antonia J. Levi, Introduction to Rubrics An Assessment Tool to Save Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning, Sterling: Stylus, 2005.
John C. Bean has an undergraduate degree from Stanford (1965) and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1972). His book Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 1996) has been translated into both Dutch and Chinese. The co-author of several widely-used composition textbooks, he has also published numerous articles on writing, argumentation, and writing-across-the-curriculum as well as on literary subjects including Shakespeare and Spenser. He has recently returned from BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he and his wife conducted a series of critical thinking workshops for Bangladeshi educators. He is particularly interested in strategies for accelerating students’ growth in critical inquiry and argument, for teaching undergraduate research, for promoting quantitative literacy through writing assignments that ask students to think critically about numbers, and for developing institutional learning outcomes assessments that promote productive faculty conversations about teaching and learning.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series: Performing CPR in a General Education Chemistry Course Improves Critical Thinking, Puzzling, and Reasoning Skills
Wednesday, February 18
Greg Muth, Chemistry and 2008-09 CILA Associate
All teachers are interested in how to help their students learn how to think critically in their disciplines. Most of us would like learning these skills to begin in the first course. Yet, in an introductory course, the need to simultaneously master new content along with disciplinary-based critical thinking skills may be difficult for many students. Greg’s scholarship of teaching and learning project began with his observation that “the gradual acquisition of this broad chemical knowledge base and its maturation into skills that manifest in the ability to solve complex problems is unlikely to occur in a one-semester general education chemistry course.”
Capturing scholarly inquiry into learning: Teaching Portfolios
Tuesday, March 3
Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas
(co-sponsor: Department of Psychology and the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation)
In this session, Dan Bernstein will show examples of course portfolios that make learning by instructors and by students visible to colleagues. As he explains the session, “faculty members create these web-based documents to represent their goals, methods, students’ performances, and lessons learned. Taken as a whole this work demonstrates how faculty members can treat their everyday teaching as a form of intellectual inquiry into successful learning. When the inquiry and its results are made public, then other scholars can use the lessons learned, expand the practices reported, and comment on what is learned by both students and faculty members.”
Discussion will include both the practicalities of creating such representations within an academic job, and the merits and drawbacks of the scholarly inquiry metaphor.
SUGGESTED REFERENCES:
Bernstein, D., Burnett, A.N., Goodburn, A. and Savory, P. (2006). Making teaching and learning visible: Course portfolios and the peer review of teaching. Bolton, MA: Anker.
Bernstein, D. and Bass. R. (2005) “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” Academe, 91(4), 37-43.
Dan Bernstein received an A.B. in psychology from Stanford University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego in 1973. He was a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln from 1973 until 2002, when he became Director or the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas. He is also a Professor of Psychology at KU.
Dan served from 1999 to 2003 as Director of a five-university project for implementation of faculty fellowships to generate peer reviews of teaching materials. His recent writing has focused on representation of the intellectual work in teaching, especially through the external review of electronic course portfolios centered on student work. He works with colleagues from many fields of study in developing ways to showcase the quality of their student work and the practices that have helped that work emerge. (See http://www.cte.ku.edu/teachingInnovations/gallery/ and alsohttp://www.courseportfolio.org/).
Dan has received numerous campus awards for teaching, he was a Charter Member of the University of Nebraska Academy of Distinguished Teachers, and he received the 2001 University of Nebraska Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award. He was a Carnegie Scholar in 1998 and continues in the institutional program of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Recently he has received the J. Michael Young Academic Advising Award at KU and the Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education Award from Div. 25 of the American Psychological Association.
Taming Technology: Useful Ideas for Teaching with Film from Boldt Seminarians
Wednesday, March 11
Diana Postlethwaite, English and Media Studies; Judy Kutulas, History and Women’s Studies; Jim Hanson, Religion
(co-sponsors: Boldt Chair in the Humanities, IIT)
During January 2008. eight St. Olaf faculty participated in a Boldt Seminar entitled Film: Technicalities, Theory and Teaching. In retrospect, the ordering of this title proved prophetic: we discovered that technicalities often do come first. Our understandings of film theory, and the pedagogical structures we evolved to share them, first, with our fellow seminarians, and later with our students, often rest on the foundation (bedrock? earthquake? precipice?) of pushing the button.
For this CILA Conversation, three Boldt Seminar veterans of the technology wars will present their reports from the front lines: since January 08, what technologies have we been using in teaching with film? what works? what is problematic? where is St. Olaf today when it comes to tech support for teaching with film?
The goals of this CILA lunch are both inspirational and practical: hands-on and how-to demos, and most important HAND OUTS to take away with you! You are invited whatever your level of achievement or aspiration. PC and Mac speakers will both be recognized. The session is organized as follows:
* Technology 101: Prof. Judy Kutulus, Dept. of History: tips for the film technology novice
* Technology 202: Prof. Diana Postlethwaite, Dept. of English: how to bookmark films; how to create still photos from films
* Technology 303: Prof. Jim Hanson, Dept. of Religion: how to make film clips (which can be imported into PowerPoint and posted on Moodle).
Some useful online resources:
1. “Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use in Teaching for Film and Media Educators from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Pubic Policy Committees Subcommittee on Fair Use:
http://www.cmstudies.org/documents/SCMSBestPracticesforFairUseinTeaching-Final.pdf,
2. The Librarian of Congress has granted TV/film instructors the right to assemble film clip-DVDs:
http://www.screensite.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=1
3. Online tutorial on how to create a compilation of DVD clips for classroom use, using a Mac:
http://tvcrit3.tvcrit.com/content/view/68/116/
This takes the reader through the process step-by-step — from acquiring clips from copyrighted DVDs to burning them onto a new DVD, and does it all with free software.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series – Teaching Creativity and Creative Teaching: Using Creative Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines
Wednesday, March 18
Jenny Dunning, English and 2008-09 CILA Associate; Karen Achberger, German; Peder Jothen, Religion; Sharon Powell, Social Work and Family Studies; Marc Robinson, Russian Language and Area Studies
(co-sponsor: Writing Program)
Jenny Dunning and members of the Creative Writing across the Curriculum CILA Learning Community will share their insights about the potential benefits of using creative writing assignments across the curriculum. The group has been engaged in discussions ranging from what creative writing assignments can bring to other disciplines to the role of narrative itself in those disciplines. Their explorations have involved not only practice but theory, particularly their growing understanding of writing-to-learn strategies, and the value of offering students both high stakes and low stakes assignments. They will share examples of successful assignments, and talk about how grading creative writing assignments can be made easier by structuring them as low stakes tasks, or by constructing them as a sequence. They will provide handouts.
Jenny will also talk about her own scholarship of teaching and learning project, which involves the design and assessment of a different approach to teaching creative writing that will be implemented in the new course Fundamentals of Creative Writing (English 150). She will reflect on what it means to teach the practice of creativity in the creative writing classroom and share her ideas for using introductory student writing portfolios to assess the effects of this changed approach on student learning.
Suggested readings:
– Peter Elbow, High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing, New Directions For Teaching and Learning, no. 69, Spring 1997 © Jossey-Bass Publishers. Pp. 5-13.
– Patricia A. Connor-Greene, Catherine Mobley, Catherine E. Paul, Jerry A. Waldvogel, and Art Young, editors,Teaching and Learning Creatively: Inspirations and Reflections, Parlor Press.
– Art Young, Teaching Writing Across the Curriculum, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Chapter 2.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Series – The faculty role in successful outcomes for underprepared college students
Wednesday, April 8
Diane Angell, Biology, and Heather Campbell, Education (2008-2009 CILA Associates) with members of their learning community on strategies for working with underprepared college students: Dana Gross, Psychology; Eric McDonald, Education; Kris MacPherson, Library and Asian Studies; Bruce Nordstrom-Loeb, Sociology & Anthropology; Mary Walczak, Chemistry
As the article by Vincent Tinto (linked below) notes, students from low income backgrounds tend to graduate from college at much lower rates than their higher income counterparts. Based on the data and resources gathered by this CILA Learning Community, participants in Wednesday’s discussion will situate this problem in the St. Olaf context, and will discuss scenarios faculty members may face in their classrooms. Participants will be invited to brainstorm possible solutions and share best practices. Campus resources for supporting underprepared students will also be shared.
Suggested readings:
http://www.pellinstitute.org/tinto/TintoOccasionalPaperRetention.pdf (Student Retention and Graduation: Facing the Truth, Living with the Consequences — Vincent Tinto, 2004)
http://www.springerlink.com/content/570787222g5u4163/ (Is that paper really due today?: differences in first-generation and traditional college students understandings of faculty expectations – Collier & Morgan, 2008) currently only the abstract is available online.
Moving the Classroom into the Community: Four Examples of Academic Civic Engagement
Tuesday, April 14
Dana Gross, Psychology; Eric Fure-Slocum, History, American Conversations; Nate Jacobi, Center for Experiential Learning; Paul Roback, MSCS-Statistics; Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak, Political Science and Asian Studies
(co-sponsors: Center for Experiential Learning – Lilly Grant and Civic Engagement Program)
Civic engagement and classroom learning need not operate independently in fact, when it is well conceived, course-based (academic) civic engagement can enhance academic learning and prepare students for active citizenship. As the lines between the classroom and the community become blurred, students learn to make connections across disciplines and to contextualize knowledge. In addition, connections with the community can stimulate intellectual inquiry and research for both students and faculty.
Four faculty will share their experiences of incorporating an academic civic engagement component (i.e., service-learning, community-based research, public scholarship, etc.) into one of their courses during the fall semester. Each presenter will talk about the community project, with a special emphasis on the connection between the project and course learning objectives and the impact on student learning. They will also discuss the value and challenges of community-based learning as a pedagogical approach.
Four different academic civic engagement courses will be highlighted:
* American Conversations 101 (Eric Fure-Slocum) Students participated in voter registration and other forms of political engagement to explore how voting fit into past and present understandings of American citizenship
* Immigration and Citizenship (Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak) — Students examined resources available to immigrants in Rice County and completed community-based research reports in collaboration with Rice County Growing Up Healthy
* Infant Behavior and Development (Dana Gross) — Students partnered with the Faribault Early Childhood and Family Education Center to produce two educational videos: Play and Motor Development in Somali and Sudanese Cultures and Language and Literacy
* Statistics for Sciences (Paul Roback) Teams of students analyzed survey data from farmers on river-friendly practices for the Cannon River Watershed Partnership and data from a bi-annual residential survey for the Dakota County Office of Planning and Analysis
Please see here for a description of other courses that have included an academic civic engagement component during the 2008-09 academic year.
Further reading:
Caryn McTighe Musil, “Educating for Citizenship,” Peer Review, June 2003.
https://www.stolaf.edu/pipercenter/FacultyStaff/Educating for Citizenship- PR.pdf
Eugene M. Lang, “Distinctly American: The Residential Liberal Arts College,” Daedalus, Winter 1999 (pp. 142- 149 are most relevant). Eugene Lang is Chairmen Emeritus of Swarthmore College and Founder and President of Project Pericles.
http://www.projectpericles.org/Eugene_Lang.pdf
Jeffery Howard, Principles of Good Practice for Service-Learning Pedagogy (Excerpted from Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning: Service-Learning Course Design Workbook, University of Michigan: OCSL Press, 2001)
The President’s Colloquy on Higher Education
Wednesday, April 22
Looking Ahead to the Future: Planning for Excellence in a Changing World
The Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) is pleased to announce the “President’s Colloquy on Higher Education” for the spring semester. President Anderson describes the colloquys as “an occasional series of conversations about issues facing higher education in America and their impact on St. Olaf.” He hosts one faculty lunch conversation each semester, and will also invite occasional speakers to campus to address important issues in higher education.
In this session, David will share some of his thoughts on planning for the future at St. Olaf, and looks forward to hearing your ideas about planning for excellence in a changing world.
A suggested background reading for this session is “Institutional Planning That Makes a Difference: What works, what doesn’t, and why,” by Ann Korschgen, Rex Fuller, and Leo Lambert” (April 2000 AAHE Bulletin). The article is on-line at: http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/aprilf2.htm
Assessing Professional Activity for Tenure and Promotion: What we learn from departmental statements for professional activity.
Tuesday, April 28
Rick Goedde, Economics and Management Studies, and former chair of the Tenure and Promotion Committee; Tonya Kjerland, Senior Research Analyst, Institutional Research and Evaluation; David Schodt, Economics, and CILA Director; Mary Walczak, Chemistry, and 2008 director of Evaluation and Assessment
(co-sponsor: Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation (IRE))
Mary and Tonya will present an analysis of changes in the content and form of departmental statements of professional activity. Rick, as a recent chair of the Tenure and Promotion Committee, will discuss how these statements are used by the Committee, and will comment on what we may learn from this analysis.
In his 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer noted that on campuses across the nation, there is a growing recognition that the faculty reward system does not match the full range of academic function and that professors are often caught between competing obligations there is a lively and growing discussion about how faculty should spend their time. He proposed broadening the definition of scholarship to include scholarships of discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
At St. Olaf College, the expected standards for scholarship, research, and creative activity are specified by each department in its Statement of Significant Professional Activity. Last summer, the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) and the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation (IRE) collaborated on an analysis of how national conversations about changing definitions of scholarship might be reflected in our departmental statements. The project also provided an opportunity to explore the use of a qualitative date analysis program, MAXQDA, which has potential for many other projects faculty might consider.
Suggested resource:
1. Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990
2. Charles E. Glassick, Mary Taylor Huber, Gene Maeroff, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997
3. St. Olaf Departmental Statements on Professional Activity https://www.stolaf.edu/offices/doc/tenure/
4. Randy Bass, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem?http://www.doiiit.gmu.edu/Archives/feb98/randybass.htm